The Danchenko trial is over, the defendant (predictably) walked, and Special Counsel John Durham is presumably working on the final draft of his report on the Russia Hoax. But there’s one facet of the trial that deserves a closer look before the book is closed.

Sergei Millian, the Russian national who was essentially framed as a Russian spy by Glenn Simpson and others connected to the hoax, has said he chose not to come to the U.S. to testify about the FBI due to fears for his family’s safety. As long as he stayed out of the country, he was out of reach of a subpoena and decided to take advantage of that. But Durham, without being able to put him on the stand to testify there was no phone call with “dossier” source Danchenko, had no way of proving Danchenko had lied to the FBI about the call. Danchenko’s legal counsel argued that just because there was no phone record didn’t mean the call hadn’t taken place over a secure phone app. (Hey, prove it DIDN’T.) Danchenko was acquitted.

Most write-ups on the trial have not focused on this matter of “the missing witness” and, especially, WHY he was missing. So we went back to Paul Sperry’s reporting from last year, right after Danchenko was indicted for lying, to get some perspective. According to the indictment, event though Danchenko had apparently made up the whole phone call, the FBI still used his fake source’s claims of “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Russia and Trump to convince a secret federal court, the FISA Court, to allow investigators to electronically monitor at least one low-level Trump advisor, Carter Page. It really is just sickening now to look back on all this, knowing it was made up out of whole cloth yet dominated the news for Trump’s entire term of office.

As Sperry reported last year, “Agents swore in court documents reviewed by REALCLEAR INVESTIGATIONS that Danchenko was ‘truthful and cooperative’ even after discovering he misled them regarding his allegedly well-placed source.”

Sperry made it clear that Millian had strongly denied having had that phone call with Danchenko. In case you missed the report, which we linked to after the verdict came in, here it is.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS STORY, PLEASE GO HERE>>>

Lesson from Netflix for all other companies

Get un-woke, stop going broke.

https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/10/19/netflix-dumped-woke-and-stopped-going-broke-n504425

But notice that the write-up by the Hollywood Reporter fails to mention that this rebound comes after Netflix refused demands to cancel Dave Chapelle and instead told the whining crybullies on its staff that if they couldn’t deal with creating programming for people with different views, perhaps they needed to find someplace else to work.

If these big media companies subscribed to this newsletter, they could have saved millions of dollars because that’s precisely the advice I gave in 2020 to the New York Times when their young SJW staffers had a hissy fit over the paper running an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. They all should have been told that it’s the duty of an editorial department to present a broad range of viewpoints, and if they couldn’t deal with that, they might want to consider a career in the food service industry. Instead, the publisher sided with the snot-nosed brats, and the editor who approved the piece was smeared as a “fascist” (of course) and lost his job.

That editor, James Bennet, is now speaking out about what happened to him, and it’s a must-read, especially for the bosses at the Times. Bennet said his only regret is attaching an editor’s note to Cotton’s piece to try to mollify those people, but he never apologized and still doesn’t (never apologize to someone claiming offense over something inoffensive; showing weakness is like tossing chum into shark-filled waters. Apologies are what feed the cancel mob’s addiction to feeling powerful.)

Bennet accuses Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger of disloyalty and of missing an opportunity “to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality.” He said the Times wants the applause of the left, and they kowtow to them because they’ve signed up so many subscribers in the past few years who expect “that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids. 

He’s right, the former “paper of record” is now just a broken record, endlessly repeating leftist clichés and fake news for their brainwashed niche audience even as rising numbers of Americans turn against them. They’ve gone from a major newspaper to a print version of The Daily Show.

By the way, that op-ed by Sen. Cotton recommended that the National Guard be called to quell the riots that were destroying America’s cities at the time. I wonder how many black residents who were losing their businesses and homes agreed with that. I wonder how many far-left “progressives” in cities like Portland and San Francisco secretly wish the National Guard would show up and save them right now.

The cat is out of the bag

Despite the Democrats’ ludicrous attempts to blame inflation on everything from COVID to Putin to Biden “creating millions of jobs,” South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn let the cat out of the bag on MSNBC. Inflation is mostly being fueled by the Democrats’ massive spending bills flooding the economy with trillions of deficit dollars. And they knew that when they passed them.

https://www.westernjournal.com/top-house-dem-finally-admits-truth-blame-inflation-us-knew/

Clyburn said, “All of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise.” 

It’s nice to learn that someone in the Democratic Party actually passed Econ 101, but I guess that acknowledging one of the most basic facts of economics might have stood in the way of showering trillions of dollars on Party supporters like the green movement.

They say that truth is the first casualty of war, but it also took some near-lethal blows from this Congress and White House.